Drag Herstory: The Drag Queen Who Ran For President in 1992

A still from a video from Media Burn Archive of Joan Jett Black's presidential candidacy announcementMedia Burn Archive

RuPaul’s Drag Race has made drag more popular than ever — but as much as we love the queens on screen, it’s important to know the drag legends who came before them, making the art form what it is today. This is Drag Herstory.

“‘I would love to hear Tom Brokaw say ‘Joan Jett Blakk, the queer candidate for president.’ That would be great. That needs to be said.”

In January 1992, drag queen Joan Jett Blakk announced her candidacy for president under the slogan “Lick Bush in ‘92!” She ran as a part of the Queer Nation Party, having helped found the Chicago branch of the activist organization. In doing so, she became the first ever drag queen to run for president.

Joan Jett Blakk is the drag alter ego of performer, artist, and activist Terence Smith, who began doing drag in 1974. Having once worked as a fitness instructor, he had a muscular build he never wanted to hide under dresses or catsuits. For Smith, who said his drag was inspired by Grace Jones, David Bowie, and Divine, the power in drag was “stomping on that line between male and female and erasing it.” In a look he later described as part Coco Chanel, part Frederick’s of Hollywood, Smith as Joan would soon take Chicago by storm.

This particular “camp-pain,” as Jett Blakk called it — because the campaign was “putting in the camp, taking out the pain, honey” — was on the heels of her attempt to run for mayor of Chicago against incumbent Richard Daley the previous year, also as a part of the Queer Nation Party. Blakk didn’t expect with any seriousness to win either campaign, but instead ran to draw attention to LGBTQ+ rights that were being ignored by the government at the time. This was at the peak of AIDS activism, 10 years after the disease was first reported, and activists like Blakk felt that not nearly enough was being done to help people who had it. Her campaign was strong enough to land her on the cover of Chicago magazine New City alongside Mayor Daley himself, with the headline “King and Queen of Chicago.” Though she lost the mayoral election, she claimed for herself the title “Queer Mayor of Chicago” anyway.

The presidential run was also a way for the Queer Nation Party and its Chicago branch to draw attention to how much of a joke the entire election process was — together they saw both potential candidates, Clinton and Bush, as a loss, since they felt neither placed any real value on queer rights. So, as Blakk put it, she tossed her wig into the presidential race, with platforms — the seven-inch ones she wore as well as the desire to fire everyone in Washington and start calling the White House the Lavender House; to have, she said, "Dykes on Bikes patrolling the borders;" to abolish all student debt; to "make the Supreme Court more fun by making it the Supremes Court;" moving the nation’s capital to someplace more interesting, like Palm Springs; returning Kennebunkport to Native Americans; as well as, of course, gay rights, universal healthcare, and a woman’s right to choose. "You can watch the news and never hear the word ‘gay’ mentioned," Blakk said at the time. "That just unnerves me. But with this campaign, they’ll have to say the word; I’ll make them."

And so the satirical campaign began to take shape, with Blakk making her way through first Chicago and then even the Democratic National Convention in spike heels and miniskirts, blonde wigs and pearls, leather jackets, pink lipstick, and scads of costume jewelry. On her birthday, the Chicago Reader reported that Blakk had announced her candidacy by laying claim to become “the first queer, black drag-queen president." Blakk promised that if she were elected, everything in America would be "more fabulous, more fruitful, and more glamorous." She did interviews on radio and television, played live with a band, famously crashed galas, and had a float in the notoriously straight Chicago St. Patrick’s Day Parade — she and her Queer Nation coterie were the first openly gay group to participate. At Chicago’s annual Halsted Street Market Days Festival, she perched herself in a bed on the sidewalk and asked passersby to “Create Your Own Scandal. Your Picture in Bed with a Presidential Candidate,” parodying (and foreseeing) all the scandals other candidates would face but that she didn’t have to worry about because “it’s all out in the open with me, honey.”

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In July 1992, she did indeed take to the floor of the Democratic National Convention. It took a couple days, though, because despite having a press pass, she was not initially allowed in while in drag. Wearing the press pass in “boy drag” as Terence, however, she was admitted, and then went into the bathroom to change into a spangled red, white, and blue stars and stripes-printed mini dress. Soon, she became the first person to ever announce their presidential candidacy on the floor of the DNC. Republican candidate Pat Buchanan called her stunt “the greatest single exhibition of cross-dressing in American political history.” He was trying to reprimand her, but it really just sounds like a compliment.

Blakk did not win, of course — ”I’m just going to declare myself president because I’m tired of waiting,” she said — but again that was never the goal: rather, the goal was to bring visibility to queer issues, which she did in 1992 and again when she ran in 1996, on her own Blakk Pantsuit Party ticket. At this time, she even won an Iowa primary. After relocating from Chicago to San Francisco, she ran for mayor of the city in 1998 (and sadly lost). Known for her charisma and outrageousness, you couldn’t look away from Blakk and you thereby also couldn’t look away from queer issues at a time when they didn’t get nearly as much or enough representation. In a perfect blend of satire and camp and criticism, she drew attention to voices that had been out of the public sphere for too long. Who knows what a good pair of seven-inch platforms and some false eyelashes could do for our political candidates in the future?

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